---
date: 2017-11-09
modified_at: 2018-05-20
tags: [entrepreneurship, philosophy, programming]
description: A reflective look back at 2017 as a year of learning React Native and JavaScript, documenting the journey from ideas and failed projects to finally achieving productive flow and being ready to ship real products.
---
# Real artists Ship - A look back at 2017.

I started as an entrepreneur in Januari this year. That's 10 months ago now.

Januari, Februari and March have been mostly traveling and ideas. I had an
Instagram to build a community and contacted some people for advice, but that's
it. I didn't create much.

In April I went to Chiang Mai and built a huge social network on Wordpress. At
least I created something, but the quality was crap. I needed to learn how to
build real things.

In May I started exploring Javascript and tried a lot of open source projects. I
read a lot about it and in June [I decided to really learn it](/2017/and-then-i-turned-to-javascript) because it seemed to be
the best way to do things at the time. So I started reading and following
courses.

In July and August I have been learning and creating my first app with React
Native & Apollo using some open source material and courses. But I didn't ship
because the project codebase became too complex and I drowned in a cup of tea
that was not my cup of tea. It was never going to be ready if I continued like
this because I spent debugging for ever... In this period I was also very
demotivated to code because I knew it wasn't gonna work. I didn't know what to
do because I didn't want to give up this project. It was my end-goal. But it was
just too much. I needed to learn piece by piece first.

So I decided to start over. From zero. And so I did. September and October have
been about learning and applying the basics of the stack I want to make an app
with. Learning by creating from scratch. Now I have a really good understanding
of what I'm doing.

Now it's november: The past two days I have spent 8 hours a day in the code
editor, which means that I didn't need to look up much. Last week I created a
to-do app for teams called 'Proud'. This week I went on from that and now I'm
halfway of re-creating MasterCrimeZ - a Maffia-Style Text-based RPG I created
long ago using MySQL, PHP and Web. Now I'm building that using Javascript &
Native.

I know what to do and how to do it, and this is an amazing feeling. I'm finally
where I want to be: In Flow. Pure creation. If the rest of november and december
will follow this pattern, then there are great times ahead. I will get shippin'!
Cuz real artists ship.

December has yet to come but I can already make a prediction: For me 2017 was a
year of ideas, choosing the right ones, and learning a lot about how to create
them. 2018 is going to be the year of creation.